


The Vibe Was Off

by Qwerty_2poynt0



Category: Original Work
Genre: How Do I Tag, Secret Santa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:07:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28222146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Qwerty_2poynt0/pseuds/Qwerty_2poynt0
Summary: "So how come you're not passed out like everyone else?""The candles didn't match my aesthetic.""... What?"Our beloved fire fox is really only trying to have a short, fun little jaunt, but what she gets instead is arguably more interesting but objectively more exhausting.





	The Vibe Was Off

**Author's Note:**

> I really wanted to write a cute, fun little adventure 'cause Moonie's concept lends itself to little episodic adventures really well! My ADHD got in the way quite a bit for a lot of the process, but I did my best!

The Antfield newspaper office wasn't exactly much to write home about. Antfield itself wasn't exactly much to write home about. Unless of course you lived there, in which case Moonie assumed people wrote one another about the goings on about town all the time. After all, the internet wasn't exactly a thing in this universe and the mail system was honestly better than most places _with_ internet.

That easy communication and this small, unremarkable town only made this situation all the more concerning.

Moonie came to this town to have a nice, relaxing weekend. She just picked a place and zipped on over, but apparently whoever was in charge at the moment decided 'Hm. No. Actually, Moonie's gonna get a ~mystery~ to solve. Wouldn't that be a fun way to spend a weekend?'

The first thing she decided needed doing was blowing out all of these candles. Around the main office were strewn about the comatose bodies of various reporters and a truly absurd amount of sparkling purple candles that burned bright pink. They lined the windowsills, each desk had anywhere from two to five, they showed up in drippy droopy clusters on top of any available surface, including on top of the water cooler, and they cast everything into a poison dart frog kind of overlay. As she went about turning the fuchsia flickers into faint strings of smoke, her body started to feel... drained. Her eyelids drooped, her tail began to drag, and a pervasive fog began to soak into her mind.

She definitely knew this wasn't good. And yet she couldn't muster the energy to try and think of what she should do. She stared at the candle she'd been about to blow out. Why was she doing this again? Right. Sleep. Reporters were asleep. Candles are a fire hazard. Then again, she could count as a fire hazard in plenty of respects. Why did they need blowing out? Well... well clearly they're suspicious. Right?

Moonie's eyes slipped closed, but as her head bobbed forward, the edge of her ear got just a bit too close to the edge of the candle and she immediately jolted back, stumbling into a printing press.

She needed to get right out of here.

All her tail fluff stood on end, and her ears flickered nervously with her eyes as she clambered out of the now half-lit newsroom and into the street.

"Okay, something is _wrong_ in this town."

"Tell me about it."

Moonie snapped her head around to the voice and found a lanky individual with dusty teal eyes, skin that looked reminiscent of a glow-in-the-dark star with the lights on, and an absolute messy disaster of a braid running over their shoulder. Their expression seemed mostly bored and annoyed.

"... Glad to know I'm not the only one awake then." Moonie slowly turned to fully face them.

"Yeah, you rolled in right out of nowhere."

"Do you know anything about...." Moonie gestured to all of the surrounding buildings in the area.

"You could say that."

"Care to share?" She asked flatly.

"Not here."

They walked past Moonie and waved her along. Of course what else was she supposed to do but follow? The two of them made it to the outskirts of town before Moonie finally spoke up.

"So how come you're not passed out like everyone else?"

"The candles didn't match my aesthetic."

"... What?"

"A few weeks back, a new business opened up. They were selling those fancy candles saying that those were the first in a limited wave of collectibles or something. At first not everyone in town was too into it, but then those things spread _suspiciously_ fast. Whenever I go into that store, there's no one there, but the vibe is _so_ incredibly off."

"So out of everyone in town you are the only person to have enough sense not to buy the suspicious candles?"

"Look, I've kinda always been the weird one, it's like I'm impervious to this supernatural junk."

"Is this a common occurrence??"

"New businesses and events opening up and putting the town in peril? Yeah. But it's like everyone just resets after every single incident."

"... So I hope you know that the way you just said that like it's chill is _really concerning_ , right?"

They shrugged. "That's just life here. Eventually the candles will burn themselves out and everyone will return to business as usual."

"But you- Oh, wait, I just realized I never got your name."

"Never got yours either. You wanna stay mysterious nameless strangers with me?"

"... Well I do like the idea of being a mysterious nameless stranger."

"Perfect."

"But seriously Mysterious Nameless Stranger, you can't seriously think this sort of thing regularly happening is okay."

"Well... Okay, you have a point. But... It takes all my energy just to act like our town is still normal. And then I started getting used to it and now..." They gestured towards the entire town. Moonie sighed.

"Well then today's your lucky day! I happen to be a professional problem solver~"

"People pay you for that?"

"Well... not consistently. But I've got my living situation down, why not try and make other people's lives better?"

"... Well now you've gone and made me feel inadequate."

"Just hush and show me to the nearest water source."

-+-

The two of them started with the houses with the least candles burning. The houses of little old elderly couples and smaller families. The pets responded well to the Mysterious Stranger working with Moonie, which she presumed was due to them taking it upon themself to care for them while their owners were comatose or otherwise incapacitated. The stranger was almost alarmingly good at picking locks and otherwise getting into other people's houses.

"They aren't gonna suddenly come to just because we dump water everywhere." They said to Moonie through the scarf tied around their face after opening a window from the inside and taking the half full bucket of water she handed them.

"That doesn't mean we shouldn't try."

They rolled their eyes and set to work. "Whatever you say, fox lady."

It took until sundown just putting out most of the candles in the residential areas, and both of them were absolutely exhausted. Perhaps partially from second hand sleep inducing candle exposure. They flopped down in Mysterious Nameless Stranger's badly kept front yard and stared up at the stars slowly appearing across the sky.

"I don't think I've ever done that much in a single day in my entire life." They said to her.

"It certainly felt like quite the grind." She turned to them and noticed that glow-in-the-dark star quality to their skin extended to the night, and they slightly illuminated the grass and weeds within an inch of them. "But I think it was worth it."

They looked pensively up at the sky. "... Well... I think it does feel better than just sitting around waiting for things to get better again before something like this happens for the twentieth time."

"That's the spirit." She lightly punched them on the shoulder and they smiled wryly at her.

"Maybe the people who've woken up so far will wanna help out with this cleanup operation. It should go faster now that we've started. It's much easier to keep an energy up than to start the ball rolling."

"Sounds like a plan. But for now, we're gonna have to sleep. If we pass out someplace where the candles are, it definitely wouldn't be good for us."

"Rodger that. Good thing it's spring-summer time, I do not wanna get up and actually open the door to get inside."

Moonie laughed softly and let her eyes close. "We'll have to get a pretty big breakfast. We definitely need the energy."

"Yeah."

The wind in the grass and the bugs going about their business slowly faded behind the curtain of sleep.

-+-

"Hey Mysterious Stranger." Moonie looked up from where she was filling their latest bucket with water.

"Yeah?" Her tail swished curiously.

"I think I've figured something out about all this."

Moonie hefted up the water bucket. "Really?"

"Yeah. You were talking about how we need energy to keep going, and it dawned on me that nearly every time this sort of thing happens, people either start acting all squirrely or they pass right out. Then we're left alone for anywhere from two weeks to a couple months, and something new happens. I think what they're taking is our energy. Whoever 'they' are."

Moonie blinked as the gears in her head steadily whirred.

"That... is... so Sailor Moon."

"Sailor what??"

Right. Of course. This planet didn't have moons.

"Nothing, it's just... You might wanna get this energy thing sorted out sooner rather than later."

"Ooookay then?"

"Let's go! These candles won't put themselves out, and we've got people waiting on this water."

-+-

Moonie's entire weekend and then some ended up consumed by Antfield, but as she finally blew out the last candle in the newsroom where she started, she felt a sense of pride welling up inside her. The exhausted kind that left you wanting to curl up with snacks and a movie to reward yourself. Her Mysterious Stranger friend had already bid her farewell, seemingly under the assumption that once the job was done, she would roll out of town like a tumbleweed. They weren't exactly wrong, but she did plan on showing up again soon, just to get the chance to see this town she'd spent so much time in back on its feet instead of passed out on every available surface.

She picked up one of the newspapers that was presumably meant to go out the day she arrived in town. She left a few bits behind, took her souvenir, and headed to the town library. The librarian smiled and greeted her warmly and she waved happily. Moonie weaved through the shelves, taking in small details, but otherwise letting it all wash past her. Phasing through the smells and colors and the energy of the place. (hah)

As her ears lazily swiveled and her eyes went into a comfortable soft focus, the library began to do a bit of a crossfade. Shimmering about the edges, changing in some corners, until the smell of paper, topsoil, and lots of love and care drifted by her nose. There she was, in a new library. Afternoon sunshine fluttered in through the blinds on the rounded, moss bordered windows, vines draped easily from the ceiling, magic bulbs of flower light providing al the extra illumination the verdant library could need. It all exuded the same safe softness as always and Moonie breathed it in slowly.

"Moonie! When did you get here?"

Moonie smiled and turned to Florence's voice.

"Just rolled in, actually. You will not believe the weekend I had."


End file.
